I don't want to spoil your party, but do you actually now the difference between a buffer and a file (in this context)????

They are usefull and handy, but you do have to know how to use them.

The gui issue's are personal. If you like gui's that much, you should have asked for a good gui editor for linux.......

Well, that's a bit too much you are asking for
Like someone pointed out, you should go back to the basics and point out the difference between a buffer and a file...anyway, good luck if you are seriously writing an editor with all that stuff...

If you are asking emacs to do all these things, yes you are.

Emacs is not for you. Move on. Stop crying about it.

Well said Strike, well said. I totally agree with you on this. Why do people ignore the good things and start crying about the stupid things that are absent? Why can't you just ignore the buffers, type in your stuff and save it to a file? Is it too hard to do? Is it too hard to type [ESC]:wq in Vi? I don't think so. Instead of saying that you don't have any `good' editors, why can't we modify Emacs or Vi the way we want? Come on man, we are not living in a perfect world!!! How can we have a perfect editor? Thank god we have Vim and Emacs...think of a world where you have a 'Micro$soft Frontpage' type of editor, generating all the ugly HTML...so, be happy with what you get, try to make it better and hey, don't forget to distribute the changes. Good Luck!!!

A long time ago, in an Operating System Far, Far Away....

There were IDE's that were text based GUI's (Borland Turbo C, Pascal, etc)

These tools provided clear menu driven editing, compiling, debugging.... simple...

You didnt need to read a book, or take a course to learn how to use them, why? because they were WELL DESIGNED, text based IDE's.

The editors in Linux are either Over simplified with very few features (joe,pico,etc) or Over complicated (Emacs) or Only X based (Bluefish). Linux CRIES OUT for a user friendly, menu driven, text based editor, that does compilation....

Youre right... Emacs is too horrible to correct. In order to get Emacs to where it is user friendly, you would have to scrap it and start over.

This is real simple.... take an old DOS, Text based, menu driven, version of Turbo Pascal, and port it to linux, and make it compile C, JAVA, or Whatever. Like I said, if I find a good text based windowing library for Linux, Ill write it myself! Maybe ncurses library will do?

Ill call it OOPICEDIT.

If Emacs, and vi are so cool for developers... Wheres the Project Management facilities?

OK, so use KDevelop or Anjuta if you like that sort of thing.

Well, this sounds like emacs to me, but if you hate it so much, there's IDEs for Linux (i.e. KDevelop or Anjuta).

Erm, this isn't that simple, considering those editors were all closed source.

Emacs has lots of stuff for automating development (although you have to get your hands dirty with the documentation). Otherwise, use KDevelop or Anjuta .

Alex

sigh....

Both of those are strictly X based, so they cant truly compete with emacs or vi which are text based.

Hello... is this thing on?


sigh again....

You dont need the source code to port the look, feel, and functionality of an application.

You shouldnt need to read a book, just to get up and running with an editor! I didnt need a book to learn to use Bluefish! The only problem with Bluefish is that its not text based, only X.

hell, I don't understand this guy..one minute he says he wants a editor with all those popup messages and then complains that Bluefish is for X. I think you should make up your mind...and Ilama is right as ever..use Anjuta or KDevelop(I like Anjuta personally). And yes, wake up and check out the documentation for Emacs...it is one of the best free-source IDEs available...

SET's Editor

I should give it a try again. I've never run it under Linux.

-- Ugh. That is one long compile. Pretty cool, though.

NOW WE ARE COOKING WITH GAS!

See, I knew I wasnt crazy, there must have been someone else who recognized how weak all the other editors are!

Setedit is what I was thinking of! Simple, clear, concise... Windowed, Text based editor! Dont need a book to understand this!

I compiled and installed it... (took me a while to get a version that would work on my Suse 7.3 install)

TVision is the library I was thinking of too... a C++ wrapper around ncurses...

Man... its like pulling teeth for crying out loud....

Thanks Digiot!

No.
There are no decent text editors in linux. Use something else.

Now... I do like setedit....

However, there are a couple of things missing.... that would make it THE perfect editor for programmers....

The one thing is... Id like to have a command window, instead of shelling out to the command prompt....

You know... I could pop up a command window from inside the editor, and execute commands....

But thats only a small thing....

Where is the support for compiling/debugging C/C++/Java/etc?

If you take the SetEdit design, and add the above things... you will have the PERFECT editor for programmers.

Just to make something clear.... I dont have a problem with EMacs FUNCTIONALITY.... it is very, functional...with tons of features. However, I do have a problem with its PRESENTATION of its functionality... If you take the functionality of Emacs, and PRESENT it in a setedit manner.... you will have the best editor for programmers ever made by man.

If you're looking for a CLI text editor, I'd recommend you nano or mcedit, which is a part of mc (Midnight Commander).

Yeah, looking over it again, it does seem to be somewhat lacking in a tiny spot or two. It's got a great mp3 player, though. How are you even shelling out? The only thing I can see for compiling/debugging support is writing macros to run programs in the Macro menu or hitting ctrl-f9 after configuring the program to run in Options. The search continues.

I have a problem with emacs functionality - same thing as having mp3 players - it's just got too much junk and tries to do too much. Info viewer and file manager and games and a friggin' psychiatrist. It's ridiculous. But in terms of actual editor functions, I see what you're saying.

(And, in all fairness to setedit, in DOS, you can never pack too much miscellaneous functionality, such as mp3 players, into an app because of the single-tasking. There's no explanation for emacs except an aversion to quitting the program or a lack of comprehension of job control. Emacs tries to own you, basically, and get in the way of the entire freaking OS.)

Vim really is great - it's probably the perfect editor, really, except that it's too concerned with vi-compatibility and it suffers from that presentation thing. It's just a pain in the @$$ to use. Repeat after me: I am not on a 200-baud modem connecting to a mainframe from a dumb terminal with 6 keys on the keyboard.

Geee what is wrong?

We always see the vi vs emacs war, but this is even worse..

vi and emacs are both very powerful, and are not simple text editors (well some might argue that vi is : )

As always, there is a tradeoff for the additional power, and that is the learning curve, initial setup etc.

I wont talk for vi since I am an emacs user. With emacs, it requires some time to configure for your personal tastes. Every aspect of the editor is configurable and it has a LOT of power. There is no 'simple' way to make all these features available to the user unless every user wants the same set of features and behaviour, but we dont, we want our own...

But when you have your setup, its easy to take your emacs files (.emacs etc) to any other machine running emacs, and yazza you have your pre configured emacs ready to run!

I think some people in this thread need to spend a little more time (its called an investment) to get over the learning curve of these two editors, they are very popular for a reason, and that is because they are powerful!

Regarding indenting: You can configure emacs to do your indenting just how you like it! or turn it off or do what ever you like...

just my 8 cents.

Cheers